It does sound Randian. Like Rand, you're ignoring the sheer enormity of what it takes to make a masterpiece.
I think again you're getting hung up on the little things -- I'm not talking about how you need great grips and cinematographers and editors, and I'm not talking about how you need pixel perfect comps by 10 visual designers. All of that is micro.
An auteur has final cut, and if even one of those 100 people screw up, then the auteur says fix it or its not ready.
The producer is not an artistic role, he's a business one. Most producers are a lot smarter than you'd give them credit for, but they ignore their artistic sensibilities and focus on the bottom line. Before you get to them, you have lots of brilliant collaboration: Directors and writers and cinematographers and directors of photography and sound editors and actors, of course actors, all dance together and form really incredible things in tandem. Very rarely is a single voice dictating. Even in the case of the great auteurs there's collaboration: See how David Lynch works in tandem with Angelo Badalamenti on most of his projects. So that all works perfectly, right till you hit the business people.
Dustin's writing from the assumption that making a web site is all about the design. He's treating web sites like you're treating film. And, like you, he's assuming that the reason AA's web site sucks is that the artists are terrible at their jobs, and he's railing blindly at them, when in fact the people in charge aren't tasteless so much as they don't care about taste as much as the artists do.
I actually wrote an off-the-cuff post about this a little while ago regarding the music industry, how problems in perception start because we don't realize just how much more important business is than art for most companies/people: http://marinich.tumblr.com/post/200996589/talentless
The website is only one aspect of a panoply of experiential factors that the management of AA should care about. It is their product. It's their reason for being. But they don't care.
And I think for Dustin, that is the problem he's calling attention to.
The other side of the problem was also illustrated here, which was that Dustin provided a very shallow analysis at first, and that analysis hasn't gotten much deeper. His take on things moved from "the designers know nothing" to "the CEO knows nothing". I suspect he knows even less about business than he does about design. It further irks me that at no point in this conflict has he said "I'm sorry that I said some stupid things; let me rephrase myself." Instead it's "This guy makes some good points but I'm still in the right." It's as smug and insincere as his shallow article designs that get so lauded.
(At that, I think I'm gonna bow out of this argument, at least for tonight. The snippy emails Dustin sent me in response to one of my comments is making me look only at the flaws in his logic, so I don't think I'm being as bipartisan as I'd like to be. Because I won't be able to edit this in the morning, I'm sorry if I came across as a dick in this discussion; I really enjoyed having this debate.)
It doesn't have to be that way.
If you want to liken Curtis to Keroac, that's a good comparison. Both make shallow things that appeal to you until your tastes have matured somewhat. I'm not going to say AA is Ulysses, meanwhile, but all of AA's competitors' sites were designed by commitee, too, and it worked great for them.
Apple's strategy is actually originally inspired by the Beatles, where five people all contributed and the resulting songs sounded nothing like any one of those people in particular. I'm certain if Steve Jobs designed everything on his own, Apple would be different than it is with a dozen people all working on one thing. And Jonathan Ive says this directly in interviews. He refuses credit for his work, because in his mind it's the entire team working together that's responsible for his final work.
Sure, Jobs isn't designing every little piece - it's more that he serves as the dictator. Because he's very unforgiving in design reviews, I think his subordinates start to think like him.
Dictator usually have advisors, but in history, the dictators who are swayed by lots of advisors with strongly competing interests tend not to do too well.